“... medicine Cummings proposed to turbocharge innovation – including drastic reform of the civil service, and massive R&D spending in place of simply funnelling money up north – was far too much for Johnson, who was terrified it might make him unpopular. That left a vacuum where serious policy might be. Soon enough the empty space was filled by ...”

“... comprises delusional boasts that cast them as philosophers and their trade as at best a social service, at worst a particularly dodgy branch of alternative medicine or new age bunk: sustainabulous, green, responsible, liminal, wellness, community, performative, holistic, participatory, community (again). Mind mange? Ghosts in the infrastructure? Boney’s ...”

“... blacks in Chicago and other Northern cities to respond to stimuli as European immigrants had. Robert Kennedy’s ideas for the urban Community Development programme were based on the notion that the ghettos could be converted (in Lemann’s words) ‘into the kind of launching-pads for immigrant upward mobility that the Irish neighbourhoods of Boston had ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... romantic passage of Mary’s life. In 1899 she opened her heart to George Nathan of the Colonial Service, calling herself ‘that melancholy thing that will always serve and fear you’. Nothing came of it. Nathan was a confirmed bachelor, who had hoped to make use of Mary’s knowledge and influence. To him she was ‘the cheerful Miss Kingsley’. ‘I’m ...”

“... worried: one of Shpayer-Makov’s most interesting discoveries is that the Victorian plainclothes service attracted very few middle-class recruits. Almost all police detectives were working-class men who’d graduated from the uniformed branch. And since they weren’t gentlemen, they couldn’t be trusted to uphold gentlemanly values. The freelance ...”

“... an average MacBook with five or six years of useful life; roughly £1000 for two years of iPhone service. One measure of Jobs’s achievement is the money Apple earns from millions of individual consumers, revenue that has continued to increase while the global economy stagnates. Isaacson lists some of the ways in which our lives are shaped by minor design ...”

“... educated in the US but the former heads of the Saudi National Guard and the General Intelligence Service, as well as members of the Allegiance Council and a former defence minister, also attended Sandhurst. A skeleton British military presence remained behind in the Gulf. In 2016, Theresa May pledged to increase Britain’s military commitments ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to ...”

“... internal unity has gravely impaired. The hollowness of this pretext has become obvious ever since Robert Simpson, one of our leading composers, announced his resignation after decades of distinguished BBC service: the saddest event, this, in the BBC’s musical history. Otherwise, the Corporation has succeeded, more or ...”

“... Living Mountain, in an edition called The Grampian Quartet. But it took the apostolic arrival of Robert Macfarlane, who proclaimed her works in The Old Ways and in an introduction to the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, to turn Shepherd into a publishing sensation. It’s a chippy Aberdonian thing to say, but I notice that this validation had to come ...”

“... in a growing body of writing as a sanctuary. ‘Healthy’ homes made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of ...”